









































50

Presbyterian and Reformed
Virginia Dearborn, Princeton Theological Seminary, Secretary
Sharon Taylor, Shadyside Presbyterian Church (Pittsburgh, PA)

MEMBERS PRESENT

• James Pakala, Covenant Theological Seminary, Convener
• Margaret Alkema, Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary 
• Anita Coleman, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
• Steve Crocco, Yale University
• Virginia Dearborn, Princeton Theological Seminary
• Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary (Orlando, FL)
• Leslie Fuller, Southern Methodist University
• Becky Givens, Covenant Theological Seminary
• Ed Hughes, Memphis Theological Seminary
• Steve Jamieson, Covenant Theological Seminary
• Denise Pakala, Covenant Theological Seminary
• Christopher Richardson, Union Presbyterian Seminary
• David Schmersal, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
• John Shaffett, Shorter University
• Sharon Taylor, Shadyside Presbyterian Church (Pittsburgh, PA)

SUMMARY

Christopher Richardson began our meeting by introducing himself 
and inviting each of us to introduce ourselves and put our names, 
institutions, and email addresses in the Zoom chat. Christopher 
then led the group in a discussion of possible projects that we could 
undertake as a group. He then led us into discussion of what has been 
happening at our respective institutions.

Events of the past year have been somewhat overtaken by COVID-
19 as, in March 2020, our schools and libraries had to close and/or 
move online very quickly. Many of our institutions had little or no 
distance learning present in the curriculum prior to the onset of the 
pandemic. A few of our libraries were in the midst of renovation or 
building projects in March and had (fortunately) been purchasing 



Denominational Group Meetings  51

more e-books than in previous years. A few institutions were just 
finishing their accreditations when the lockdowns started.

Some libraries are scanning materials for use outside the library, 
while others are beginning to offer some curbside pick-up or limited 
access to physical space within their buildings. Some library staff 
are working from home, others in the library, and some are being 
required to work on campus but “socially distanced” in another 
campus building. Most schools seem to be leaning towards a hybrid 
model for the fall—online and modified in-person teaching.

Some institutions (and therefore libraries) are under a hiring 
freeze while others are able to post and attempt to fill open positions.
Sharon Taylor, retired librarian, reported that she’s been leading 
book studies for Shadyside Presbyterian Church (Pittsburgh, PA) 
from the church library via Zoom this year.

INSTITUTIONAL  REPORTS

Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Stitt Library
Even before the outbreak of COIVD-19, this has been a year of signifi-
cant change for Stitt Library and Austin Seminary. In December, a 
week before the seminary closed for the holiday break, we learned 
that our office of institutional advancement had secured all the funds 
necessary to proceed with our planned renovation, setting in motion 
a flurry of activity. In subsequent weeks, we moved about half our 
reference collection into our temporary quarters—a former student 
lounge in another building on campus—and then worked with a 
moving company to transfer about 6000 previously selected volumes 
from our circulating collection onto library shelves we had cleared 
and set up in an underutilized racquetball court while the remaining 
84,000 volumes are in storage and remain inaccessible. The building 
project itself is projected to last about two years and has two parts: 
(1) renovating the existing 1950s half of the building, and (2) tearing 
down the 1970s half and building a new structure on the same foot-
print but one story higher. The emphasis in the renovated building 
is on additional individual and group study space with good lighting 
and plenty of electrical outlets. In anticipation of this, we had been 
aggressively purchasing e-books and other electronic resources and 
thus have found ourselves uniquely and mercifully well prepared 
for the changes brought about by the COVID-19 outbreak. Staff are 



52  A NNUA L Y E A RBOOK

currently working almost entirely remotely, fulfilling requests for 
scans on an ad hoc basis. Our plans for gradually reopening consist of 
stages tied to a decrease in the number of cases, which, at the time of 
writing this, sadly, has been moving in the wrong direction. We thus 
anticipate supporting students and faculty virtually and remotely 
for much of the fall semester.

Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary
CRTS is a small seminary with less than 30 students. We have just 
completed an ATS reaffirmation of accreditation visit in March. It 
ended up being a Zoom visit at the last minute.  I was the coordinator 
of the self-study, so I didn’t have as much time to focus on the library 
in the past year as I wanted to. During the ATS visit we also switched 
to Zoom for classes. Since then, we are rethinking our fall semester, 
and I have been involved with that as well. We kept the library open 
for appointments and are doing curbside for guest borrowers. Two 
years ago, we joined the Digital Theological Library, and that was a 
huge boon for us during the improvised distance education portion 
of our spring semester. We are also in the middle of a library redeco-
rating project. There is no lack of work to do!

Covenant Theological Seminary
At Covenant Theological Seminary, the position of library director 
is changing, as of July 1, from Jim Pakala to Steve Jamieson, who 
has worked at the Library for sixteen years and is associate librar-
ian for public services. A new position of collection development 
librarian involved a search this spring that went well but, for vari-
ous reasons, is now being renewed. Besides some volunteer service 
to the Seminary going forward, Jim will help train the new person 
when the position is filled. The Pakalas began serving at Covenant 
in August 1991, after years at Philadelphia area seminaries. Denise 
retired June 30, 2019, but works on an essentially volunteer basis 
several hours per week, one project being the cataloguing of Bibles 
in many languages donated by a collector. The Seminary is seeking a 
new president and has engaged a firm that has assisted other schools. 
With social spacing and other pandemic-related measures, class-
room use is to resume for the fall semester, but reliance on hybrid 
and online courses will be even more significant as well. Fall break 
will not occur, but the term is to conclude just before Thanksgiving.



Denominational Group Meetings  53

Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Greetings from E. M. White Library, Louisville Presbyterian Theologi-
cal Seminary! I thought it may be more of a fun and interesting read 
if I included some pictures, starting with my taking up of my new 
job on Epiphany Day, 6 January, 2020. Matthew Collins, the previous 
library director, left in mid-2019. I accepted the call to serve at LPTS 
in October 2019. Enjoy!

January 2020
My official photo for Louisville Seminary 
was taken and I settled into my office, made 
welcoming by a quilt from my mother-in-
law and tulips, daffodils, orchids, and more 
from Louisville friends. After twenty-five 
years in Southern California and having 
grown up in south India, I was full of excite-
ment about living on a seminary campus, 
participating in a beloved community life 
in winter lands, and experiencing daily life 
in snow. On January 9, I discovered “feast-
ing Friends”—a Presbyterian group—are on campus. I took a quick 
video of them after worship to share with their friends. Soon DMin 
and other students arrived on campus for J-Term. My January 16 
diary entry conveys some of my excitement:

Today, temperature was in the forties, with slight winds. Weather 
prediction was a cloudy day but I brought the sun with me! Who 
came out early bathing our campus in glorious golden light. 
Anyway, my high point today came ~ 2 pm. I participated in worship 
led by students in a 2-week all-day J-Term intensive course, The 
Art of Presence: Creative Worship for the People of God, taught by 
Mark and Cheryl Goodman-Morris. I took a few videos of the brief 
worship. It starts with a few moments with Cheryl and Mark, who 
explained what I was going to be a part of. Enjoy! Did I worship? Yes.

In January, I visited three of the local members of our consortium, 
which is called Metroversity Library Directors: Bellarmine Univer-
sity, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and University of Louis-
ville.

February 2020
Before the Spring semester began, we took a field trip to Fort Knox! 
Bobi Bilz, admin coordinator, and Angela Morris and Angeles 
Ankrum, two of the professional librarians on staff, and I visited 

https://youtu.be/8mxhp7ATf0k
https://youtu.be/8mxhp7ATf0k
https://youtu.be/RCuMeltdUnwand


54  A NNUA L Y E A RBOOK

Barr Memorial Library, Fort Knox, 
Kentucky—an award-winning 
library. Bobi’s husband, Michael 
Steinmacher, is the director of 
Barr Memorial Library, and 
we learned a lot about events! 
I began co-teaching Research 
Methods and Practices with Prof. 
Sue Garrett (OT professor). I 
created the information research 
toolbox. Here’s a sketch of me in 
class by Ken Schuck (MDiv ’23). 
Research Methods and Practices 
is a new course, and this is the 
first semester it is being taught. 
We had a student enrollment 
of fifteen. A three-credit course, 
this is a required course for the 

Master of Arts in Religion degree and will be taught by me every 
spring. We planned a library open house for PC(USA), PMA, PW, 
and other friends in Louisville for the end of March that had to be 
cancelled.

March 2020
SAC COC (re-accrediting commission) site visit on the sixth went 
very well. Our quality enhancement plan focus on anti-racism was 
approved. In anticipation, in March, we had also launched an anti-
racism display as a permanent feature in the library. This will be a 
rotating collection of books and other learning resources, including 
digital and museum media, drawing from the research, scholarship, 
and creativity of our library collections. Each display will highlight 
one or more of the facets of anti-racism, such as actions, practices, 
beliefs, values, doctrines, policies, people, movements, and organiza-
tions. The goal of the display is to move us beyond the current racial 
imagination into a theological one that transforms us into integrative 
anti-racists: lifelong learners, tending and thriving in the “whoso-
ever” call of Louisville Seminary. The physical anti-racism display is 
supplemented by an online resource, the Anti-racism Digital Library. 
I invite you to visit endracism.info or to read my article in the spring 
2020 issue of Theological Librarianship about using the ADL to teach 
information literacy.

http://endracism.info
https://doi.org/10.31046/tl.v13i1.560
https://doi.org/10.31046/tl.v13i1.560


Denominational Group Meetings  55

April–June 2020
In mid-March, faculty made the historic decision, like so many others 
amid COVID-19, to move all instruction online. The library has been 
super busy supporting this and working almost 24/7. I reframed it 
as a “new purpose” for librarians, evoking the Depression-era book-
mobiles—Kentucky horse librarians. While the library building and 
our physical print collections closed, the librarians and our student 
workers worked from home to deliver digital library services in ways 
we had not been doing before. We started with a blog about digital 
library services—With Much Love—that is now being redesigned as 
our new library portal. We also started an online help desk. 

We saw students hanging out in social media and began to reach 
them there as well. We celebrated National Library Week with 
contests. We created guides for exegesis assignments. Our student 
library workers helped us to create and pilot YouTube videos, info-
graphics, and more! On-campus operations at the seminary are 
now expected to re-open on August 3. All courses will, however, be 
offered online only.  Accordingly, the library is preparing fully online 
course reserves. We are exploring safe re-opening but will use a 
phased approach for requested services, such as print book delivery 
and book scanning, in accordance with public health and Seminary 
guidelines. We are planning a robust library instruction program 
for fall, starting with a fully online orientation for new students on 
August 31. We plan to include incoming and ongoing assessment 
of information and research competencies. We are continuing to 
create instructional guides in diverse formats and to prepare course-
integrated guides. We will offer a calendar and slate of requestable, 
course-integrated, and customized workshops. Some new services 
have been added to the library: online learning and institutional 
research board duties. As part of our new blog, we got G Suite for 
Higher Education for faculty to pilot. G Suite/Classroom has now 
emerged as one of the academic delivery tools for fall. We are system 
administrators and online learning support and will help our dean 
lead campus to choose a new LMS in the fall for online learning 
beyond 2020.

Personnel

• Angela Morris retired in July.
• Anita Coleman is the library director since January.
• Debra Mumford is the new academic dean since July.

https://blog.lptslove.org/
https://www.lpts.edu/news/#06262020
https://www.lpts.edu/news/#11062019
https://www.lpts.edu/news/#42420202


56  A NNUA L Y E A RBOOK

• Two professional librarian positions are open and we are look-
ing to fill them as soon as possible.

Collections and Services
Our collections are at ~195,000 resources in print, microform, and 
other formats. 1200 items were added to the library collection (i.e., 
cataloged and processed) for fiscal year 2019–20. We stopped order-
ing print books in March and have only received standing orders 
in print since then. The library’s print periodicals have been drasti-
cally reduced to 211, with ~12,000 in electronic subscriptions. Our 
electronic collections use and support for emerging technologies on 
campus, like a modern learning management system, are increas-
ing! Besides delivering services remotely, library staff have also been 
upskilling and working in teams. Our community has been most 
supportive of us during this time.

Princeton Theological Seminary
The Princeton Theological Seminary Library (PTSL) recently imple-
mented Innovative Interfaces, Inc.’s Sierra integrated library system. 
PTSL is employing WebPAC for its more traditional catalog function-
ality and continuing to use Summon as its discovery tool. ILS addi-
tions include Syndetics Unbound, mobile access, and integration with 
campus single sign-on. Prior to ILS migration, PTSL implemented 
OpenAthens to replace EZProxy for managing authenticated user 
access to e-resources and set up LEAN Library to help users encoun-
ter library resources more easily from non-library websites.

On March 20th, Princeton Seminary went into partial closure, 
its library building closed, and staff transitioned to remote work 
environments. During this time, the library has continued to offer a 
variety of services to its community, primarily through virtual refer-
ence, chat service and electronic resources. A commitment has been 
made to acquire greater amounts of electronic resources at this time 
and moving forward, including increasing the number of PTS collec-
tion items in Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending program. 
Additional library services are being reintroduced in stages as new 
protocols are developed. In April and May, the library made it possi-
ble for graduating students to return their books. This service was 
subsequently expanded to all patrons. In June, curbside book pickup 
service for PTS faculty and PhD students was implemented, and the 
front of the library was opened for quiet study space.



Denominational Group Meetings  57

During the pandemic, courses have transitioned to an online 
environment until the health situation allows for transition back 
to onsite teaching and learning. Students are returning to campus 
in the fall with carefully planned programs to allow for socially 
distanced community, team, and class activities if/when the health 
situation allows.

The library was pleased to welcome Sarah Danser as its new Seri-
als and Cataloging Librarian in April. With the transition of a number 
of staff to retirement in 2019, the library hopes to fill several vacant 
positions in the coming academic year.

Union Presbyterian Seminary

• Union Presbyterian Seminary (UPSem) has decided to hold all 
summer and fall classes online. 

• Throughout the summer, our library locations in Richmond and 
Charlotte will be closed to the public but offering a twice/day 
weekday pickup service for physical checkouts (for all library 
users) and library building usage by appointment for UPSem 
students, faculty, staff—to allow us to control the number of 
people in the building. Unless things worsen, we plan to offer 
more appointment slots in the fall, though still for UPSem users.

• We are applying for distance education (over 50%) from 
SACSCOC now, partially to enable online classes after December, 
if necessary.

• We are heavily involved in preparing for reaffirmation by 
SACSCOC and ATS over the next couple of years (class of 2022). 

• We are in the process of hiring a new reference librarian. Our 
current reference and archives librarian, Dr. Paula Skres-
let, will retire at the end of August. We will begin interviewing 
candidates for that next week, and another staff librarian (Ryan 
Douthat) will be taking over Paula’s work in our archives and 
special collections, including digitization projects.


